Gallery: Probing Geysers in Yellowstone and Chile

Geysers, which send steam and hot water hundreds of feet into the air, have long baffled scientists. So Michael Manga, a volcanologist at UC Berkeley, and his colleagues have spent years studying them in Chile and Yellowstone National Park. The following images, courtesy of Manga, are a few examples of their work. [Read the full story about these mysterious eruptions]

The grandfather geyser

El Tatio (the grandfather) geyser in the Andes Mountains of northern Chile. With over 80 active geysers, the El Tatio field is the world's third-largest field, after Yellowstone and Dolina Geizerov in Russia, according to a 2003 report in a Geological Society of America publication.

A field overflowing with steam

The El Tatio geyser field. There's a bus to the right for scale.

Instruments scattered across the geyser field

The El Tatio geyser field with an array of seismometers to record ground motion.

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Shannon is a staff writer for Live Science and Space.com. Her interests range from supermassive black holes in the early universe to environmental issues here at home. Shannon is working on a master’s degree in science, health, and environmental reporting at New York University. She has bachelor’s degrees in physics-astronomy and philosophy from Whitman College, and a master’s degree in astronomy from the University of Wyoming. She’s flown an airplane, stood within 10 feet of a wild moose, and lived in a Buddhist temple in northeast Thailand. To see her latest stories, you can visit her website.